[Ensconced at the Beverly Hilton for the Television Critics summer press tour for the next 10 days…First up, Amazon.]

Season 2 of “Transparent,” the moving and hilarious series about a trans L.A. patriarch starring Jeffrey Tambor, will drop late Sept., date TBA, Amazon said today.

Jill Soloway, creator of the multiple Emmy-nominated series, told critics the series has stepped up trans representation behind the camera (after some criticism following the first season), with both a writer and a director who are transgender working on the series in season 2.

Soloway, who was inspired to write the series as a “love letter” to her parent who came out as trans, told critics here “”It’s mind-blowing how much has happened over the past year, how our culture has caught up to ‘Trans 101.'”

Talk inevitably turned to Caitlyn Jenner. The cast and crew have met Caitlyn, Tambor said. His “Transparent” character Maura would celebrate Caitlyn’s coming out and her E! series, “I Am Cait,” he said. (It’s true, Jenner’s reality series is more educational than titillating, going beyond gawking at the makeup to talking about trans youth suicides.)

Lola Kirke and Gael García Bernal in “Mozart in the Jungle,” a new, 10-episode dramatic comedy series from Amazon. (Provided by Amazon)

Amazon has granted full seasons to five pilot projects including “The Man in the High Castle,” based on the Philip K. Dick alternative history novel, which was the most-watched pilot in the history of the online retail giant.

The four other new Amazon Original Series are: an hour-long dark comedy “Mad Dogs”; the docu-series “The New Yorker Presents” and two kids’ shows, “Just Add Magic” and “The Stinky & Dirty Show.”

Amazon today announced its pilot lineup for 2015 and our reaction is: So much potential. With big names like Carlton Cuse, Shawn Ryan, Frank Spotnitz and the New Yorker on board, the list is impressive. Customers will again be asked to give feedback on which pilots should be turned into series. It’s a clever way of doing business, getting some buzz going before making a long-term financial commitment. (Then again, “Alpha House” sounded great at first, too.)

Following the critical success of “Transparent,” there’s reason for optimism.

The seven pilots are: four hour-long dramas “Cocked” from Sam Baum (“Lie to Me”) and Sam Shaw (“Manhattan”), “Mad Dogs” from Cris Cole (“The Bill”) and Shawn Ryan (“The Shield”), “The Man in the High Castle” from Frank Spotnitz (“The X-Files”), and “Point of Honor” from Carlton Cuse (“Lost”) and Randall Wallace (“Braveheart”), plus two half-hour comedies, “Down Dog” from Robin Schiff (“Are You There, Chelsea?”) and “Salem Rogers” from newcomer Lindsey Stoddart, and a third half-hour, “The New Yorker Presents,” a mix of scripted narrative and documentary segments, produced in cooperation with the magazine.

After 10 years away from television, noted “X-Files” creator Chris Carter is bringing “The After” to Amazon. A post-apocalyptic tale set in Los Angeles, partly inspired by Dante’s Inferno, this is an idea he’s been incubating for years. He claims he really needed the break.

“For me “The X-Files” was 10 years of output, I needed 10 years of input,” Carter said.

“When I was 45 years old I stopped… I climbed mountains, went on surf trips, read a lot, watched a lot, got ready to come back…There is so much good television on now.” He watched “The Sopranos,” “The Shield” and “The Wire” during his temporary retirement. Asked why pick a digital platform like Amazon for his return, Carter said, it was “good fortune to be involved with a frontier in the business. It is how I think people will watch television exclusively from now on.”

The process isn’t markedly different from dealing with a broadcast network, he said. “The different part of the process for me is that we’re doing eight episodes as opposed to 25 episodes” (in the second season of “The X-Files”).

With Sharon Lawrence (who plays a much older woman) and Adrian Pasdar, the mystery-thriller concerns “eight strangers thrown together by mysterious forces in a violent world.” All we know from the trailer is that they share a birthday.

“I’ve always resisted the science fiction label,” Carter said, “but there’s a significant amount of science fiction here.” The series will be released one hour at a time in early 2015.

Today at the TCA press tour Amazon made a first appearance, acting less like an online shopping mall than a TV studio. Amazon Prime offers a slew of new shows with a lot of big-name talent, compounding the notion that TV is everything and everywhere. (Amazon exec Joe Lewis jokes that they’ll deliver via drone soon.)

“I feel very honored in bringing forth this subject,” Jeffrey Tambor said of his transitioning trans- character in “Transparent.” All 10 episodes of the dark, provocative comedy will be released simultaneously at the end of September.

Working for an emerging online network makes no difference for the actor. “The revolution has been here for some time,” Tambor said of the network/distributor as opposed to working in broadcast TV.

“I really don’t think of it as a lesser TV series,” said filmmaker-writer-director Jill Soloway (“The United States of Tara,” “Six Feet Under”). The actors are paid the equivalent of a network TV series. And “budget-wise, I’m working with more money than I’ve ever had before,” Soloway said.

She shopped the script around to the premium cable networks. “It was a risk to be part of a brand or slate” like Amazon. As a writer, she said, she got more instant feedback from Amazon than the usual lengthy uncertainty she faced at the networks. She doesn’t think the Amazon platform makes this a “webseries,” but rather sees the streaming service as the next evolution in independent filmmaking.

As for the transgender content: “As a feminist,” Soloway said, “I think a lot about what it means, to explore the feminine within the feminist…what it means to think about a wounded father replaced by a blossoming femininity… The ideas about gender freedom…It’s fertile ground.”

Michael Imperioli and James Gandolfini in the Sopranos. (Photo by Craig Blankenhorn, HBO)

Cord cutters rejoice. In a major HBO/Amazon deal announced today, HBO will sell reruns of its hit shows to Amazon’s online service. Classics including “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Six Feet Under” and miniseries including “Band of Brothers” will stream on Amazon’s Prime Instant Video platform beginning May 21.

This solves the problem many cord cutters have faced for years. (For manufacturers of TV sets, it’s one more threat to the business.)

Additionally, HBO’s online streaming service HBO Go will become available on Amazon’s new Fire TV settop box. The concept of instant gratification in terms of entertainment — what you want, when you want, where you– want just got closer to reality.

Consider the deal a challenge to Netflix, which until now has had the corner on the streaming market. The battle to build the biggest library begins now, knocking Netflix out of its perceived position of automatic dominance.

From the press release:

Beginning May 21, Amazon Prime members will have unlimited streaming access to:
– All seasons of revered classics such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome and Six Feet Under, and of recent favorites such as Eastbound & Down, Enlightened and Flight of the Conchords
– Epic miniseries, including Angels in America, Band of Brothers, John Adams, The Pacific and Parade’s End
– Select seasons of current series such as Boardwalk Empire, Treme and True Blood
– Hit original movies like Game Change, Too Big To Fail and You Don’t Know Jack
– Pedigreed documentaries including the Autopsy and Iceman series, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and When the Levees Broke
– Hilarious original comedy specials from Lewis Black, Ellen DeGeneres, Louis CK and Bill Maher
The multi-year deal will bring additional seasons of the current series named above, along with early seasons of other series like Girls, The Newsroom and Veep to Prime members over the life of the deal.

The project from “Doonesbury” writer Garry Trudeau boasts John Goodman in the lead in a funny but not particularly inventive political comedy about four Republican Senators sharing a house in Washington, D.C. They stay busy burnishing their images, working their donors, running for re-election and avoiding any heavy legislative lifting.

Goodman plays Sen. Gil John Biggs, a former football coach from North Carolina whose hangdog expression is mirrored by his ever-present bloodhound while his wife seems to run his office via conference calls from home. Clark Johnson plays Sen. Robert Bettancourt of Pa., who is expert at massaging the egos of his campaign contributors. Matt Malloy plays Sen. Louis Laffer of Nevada, a man of questionable sexuality who faces a macho Tea Party challenger. (An example of the too on-the-nose writing: Laffer picks up the “Say No to Sodomy Award from The Council for Normal Marriage” and knows his dress designers.) A vacancy in the house will be filled by a Marco Rubio-like dashing and self-promoting Hispanic womanizer, Sen. Andy Guzman of Florida, played by Mark Consuelos.

Bill Murray has a cameo; Wanda Sykes and Cynthia Nixon have guest roles. The whole thing looks polished and Goodman is inviting, carrying the proceedings with a thick Southern drawl. Plenty of partisan shenanigans to satirize, like “Veep,” but, unlike “Veep,” nothing addictive about it.

Three episodes will be available, free, Nov. 15; to watch further episodes, you’ll need Amazon Prime (the $79 per year premium service that also covers free shipping). Amazon will follow “Alpha House” with “Betas,” a Silicon Valley startup satire, offering 11 episodes of each.

The press tour is like television in the sense that things follow each other in no particular order. One minute it’s Buzz Aldrin, talking about moon walking, the next minute it’s Georgia, one of the horribly abused Michael Vick dogs, now a loving poster child for pitbulls everywhere in a pink leash and rhinestone collar. Aldrin is part of National Geographic’s first annual “Expedition Week,” in November, which highlights seven nights of daring trips from the pyramids to the Amazon to a shipwreck to the moon.

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Georgia is featured in NatGeo’s “Dogtown.”

Turns out I was too dismissive of Georgia in my previous post. She’s a testament to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Southern Utah, and to doggie survivors everywhere. She was quite poised as she put up with a gaggle of press.

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.